Questions remain in legal effort to keep McCrae medals in Guelph

Guelph Mercury

When Toronto businessman Arthur Lee shelled out more than half a million dollars back in 1997 for Col. John McCrae’s war medals, he said he did so to ensure the medals “will stay in Canada as long as Canada exists.”

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The self-made millionaire clothing designer stunned attendants at an auction in downtown Toronto when he bid $400,000 for the medals — fees and taxes would add another $106,000 to the total — and then immediately turned around and handed them to officials from the McCrae House Museum.

Lee had never heard of McCrae, but attended the auction out of curiosity after reading media reports about it. As he sat in the audience he read In Flanders Fields for the first time, and decided on the spot to buy the medals so they would not be bought by a private collector and potentially taken out of the country.

Also in the audience were local museum officials, armed with $280,000 donated by local service clubs, veterans’ groups and individuals similarly interested in seeing the medals remain on Canadian soil.

At the time it was reported only that the medals had “surfaced mysteriously” in recent weeks and had been made available by an anonymous seller.

The six medals were returned to Guelph and put on display at the museum which now occupies the home in which the famous colonel was born. In 2005 a seventh medal — the Memorial Cross — was donated anonymously.

A year later McCrae’s descendants learned of the donation and asked to have all seven metals returned, claiming the donor of the Memorial Cross had no legal right to possess it and that the city had accepted it illegally.

The city refused, and in 2008 a lawsuit was launched against the city. The suit claimed McCrae’s sister, Geills McCrae Kilgour, placed the medals with a Winnipeg law firm for safekeeping after the colonel’s death in 1918.

They were somehow “removed” from the firm and eventually ended up on the auction block, according to the court documents.

This week, the city announced it had come to an agreement with the McCrae descendants which will see the medals remain at the local museum. In exchange, a press release was issued acknowledging the “gift” and a plaque at the museum will serve a similar purpose.

So all’s well that ends well, right?

Not exactly.

City solicitor Donna Jaques revealed Thursday the legal battle to keep the medals cost north of $230,000, but that there was no settlement paid to the plaintiffs.

Last November, Jaques said negotiations “have been positive.”

This week, Guelph Museums director Katherine McCracken said the two sides in the dispute “have been working on a settlement essentially from the beginning” of the lawsuit.

Something doesn’t add up.

There has been a willingness on both sides to work toward a settlement, and ultimately the family was satisfied with a press release and plaque?

If they haven’t already — and we likely will never know if they do because it will be dealt with behind closed doors — I hope city councillors demand to know how this became a quarter-million-dollar hit to taxpayers.